Monique Nguyen, a 28-year-old Quincy resident who heads up a Boston nonprofit, is dedicated to empowering women who work on the margins.

By Chris Burrell

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

By Chris Burrell

Posted May. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 21, 2013 at 9:04 PM

By Chris Burrell

Posted May. 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 21, 2013 at 9:04 PM

BOSTON

» Social News

Ona recent Monday, a half-dozen women who earn a living as house cleaners and caregivers to the elderly exercised a different kind of muscle – their political voices.

The women, who knocked on doors in the State House to lobby for newly filed legislation called the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, were guided by Monique Nguyen, a 28-year-old Quincy resident who heads a Boston nonprofit dedicated to empowering women who work on the margins.

They are immigrants from Haiti and Latin America or nannies brought over from Asia and Ireland. Some are the victims of sex trafficking while others face exploitation in the form of low wages and abusive work conditions in private households and nursing homes, said Nguyen.

“You see these women sacrifice so much,” she said. “Women who haven’t seen their children in 10 years.”

The nonprofit that Nguyen now leads is called MataHari: Eye of the Day and was started in 2002 by a group of social workers, mental health workers, lawyers and physicians.

“It’s the only kind of organization doing this, fighting for rights of workers but also reparative therapy,” said Lydia Edwards, an attorney and the director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston.

Edwards said she just referred a Ugandan woman to MataHari.

MataHari operates on a tiny budget, less than $100,000 a year. Right now, Nguyen is working with women to push for passage of the domestic workers’ bill, which would require employers to offer paid sick days and paid time off.

A similar bill passed in New York last year, and Nguyen, along with other activists, is hoping to nudge the issue closer to the front burner on Beacon Hill.

Much of her motivation is born of personal experience.

She is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, refugees of the war who arrived in Canada and worked menial jobs while saving money to start their own small business, a grocery.

When Nguyen was 10 years old, her aunt in Texas experienced back-to-back tragedies. First, she was severely injured in a car accident and lost a leg. Then her husband – Nguyen’s uncle – was murdered.

In response, Nguyen and her family moved to Houston to help, and it was there that she began to witness how hard her own mother worked to help her family.

Nguyen now sees a thread connecting her mother’s action to the women she works with at MataHari: “I look at every woman here as an extension of my mother.”

When Nguyen was graduating high school, she suffered her own setback, learning that she was an undocumented immigrant.

A lawyer hired by her parents had done shoddy legal work, securing her parents’ immigration status but failing to do the same for the Nguyen children. Suddenly, she was ineligible for any educational support while her friends applied to colleges.

Page 2 of 2 - “I felt like the underclass in the U.S.,” she said. “You feel you don’t even exist.”

Nuguyen’s early struggles drew her to helping other immigrants.

“When I graduated college,” she said, “I felt a pull in me to do this work.”